Countdown
by egelantier
Summary: Zulf, from the beginning.


_Oh, will you come when I call you?_  
_I'll come when you call me._  
_I'll call you at half-past ten._  
_Ten for the atom bomb loose again._

"Why didn't you turn it all back?" Zulf asks when he can't hold it in anymore. He wants to swallow the words as soon as he utters them; he clutches the bandages in his hands tightly instead.

Kid's back tenses, and he hisses in pain, then relaxes. The silence stretches, tears, and Zulf picks up where he left, resigned to never getting an answer. Then Kid says:

"What would it change? They'd just build the Calamity all over again."

"You can't be sure."

"Can't I? Wasn't it why you left? They built it just because, and used it just because. And if neither you nor me nor Zia nor Rucks won't remember how to prevent it, why won't it happen again? Who's to say it didn't happen already, again and again and again and again?"

He's agitated now, hands fisted in the sheets, and Zulf's worried for his stitches and unwillingly fascinated. It might be the longest speech Kid made, ever, in his hearing or outside of it.

Then Kid says, softly: "Maybe I was just tired of killing everybody over and over again. Maybe I just - didn't want to lose. The others. You. Was I wrong?"

He turns around, still too pale and too gaunt, and Zulf feels something inside him break, melt.

He touches Kid's face, and gentleness comes easy to him.

Says: "No. No, you were right." 

_Oh, will you come when I call you?_  
_I'll come when you call me._  
_I'll call you at half-past nine._  
_Nine for the crippled and blind._

Zulf remembers things in intersecting ripples of light and sound - the confusion of return travel, Zia's worried face, the Bastion unmooring itself with the groan of stone and metal, haloed in the brilliant explosion of Core light. Unfamiliar bright taste of healing potion on his lips. Dreams of snow and blood instead of ash falling down from the skies.

He doesn't remember Kid's face.

When he comes to himself, his body feels fragile, newly-made. The air in tent smells of sickness and blood, and Zia's back, turned to him, is miserably worried. He makes his way to her, and sees Kid under her hands, tanned skin contrasting sharply with the white strips of linen, his face taut with pain and flushed with fever.

He says, "Zia, what?"

"He's too badly hurt. Body won't accept healing potions anymore. I don't know if - "

She breaks off, and he barely curbs the motion his arm's already started, the comforting touch he wants to offer. They don't need apologies from each other - they are both what they are, and he's not ashamed of what he did - but the ease is lost, too.

"Why don't you go see if there's something useful in the Bastion? I'll look after him."

"Will you, now?"

"How can I not?"

She leaves in a swirl of robes, and he picks up a cold compress from the table, brings it to Kid's face. He notes with a strange detachment that his hands shake.

When he looks back at Kid, Kid's eyes are opened, cloudy with fever but lucid. Zulf almost drops the cloth, but catches himself, makes a first sweep of the heated skin. He doesn't know what else to do.

Kid rasps, "You can… hate me… if it'll be easier."

Zulf says, "Will you forgive me if I won't?" 

_Oh, will you come when I call you?_  
_I'll come when you call me._  
_I'll call you at half-past eight._  
_Eight for my eight billion graves_.

Zulf wakes up to confusion, pain and cold. Pain is the foremost - swirling vortex of it resolves into a multitude of individual starbursts, and only through them he can define the wavering, uncertain borders of his body.

Zulf comes to: he's slung over somebody's shoulder, head down, everything lurching and swaying sickenly inside and outside of him. He's staring down at somebody's feet, making their unsteady, stubborn way across the bloodied snow.

Just as he recognizes the rough, worn material of the pants he's staring at, he blinks and misses an arrow shaft piercing one of them. A sound comes a split second later than sight; a sickening, solid thud of metal meeting muscle and bone.

Kid makes a noise that's not quite a noise somewhere above, an aborted grunt that Zulf perceives more like a vibration going through his body, and doesn't fall. There's a second thud then, and a third; something warm runs down Zulf's face, stains his torn collar.

Nothing makes sense. Zulf stirs, trying to free himself of Kid's careful hold, and almost passes out again. He must be worse at controlling his voice than Kid is; he must've moaned.

Kid speaks then, and it's almost like he isn't pierced by arrows like a Hense martyr by Her thorns, like he's not dragging Zulf out of the Hell Tazal Terminals turned into. Like anything in their lives makes any sort of sense right now, after everything they've both done to each other.

Kid says: "Shhh."

Kid says: "You just sleep now. I'll bring us home." 

_Oh, will you come when I call you?_  
_I'll come when you call me._  
_I'll call you at half-past seven._  
_Seven for continents blowed up._

It's too cold. Zulf doesn't want to admit it to himself, but he's gotten used to the perfect sultry heat of Caelondia. In the frost of Tazal Terminals he's shivering, even in the layers and layers of proper Ura clothing; his hands shake in tiny, almost invisible tremors.

Would Talia, he thinks unexpectedly, and flinches from the sharp memory of her name, have been miserable here? Would she'd make this place seem warm?

Somewhere, Kid is tearing through Ura defences with an inexorability of the hurricane, moving closer and closer. Zulf doesn't know why he imagined any different outcome. He watched Kid along with Rucks and Zia plenty of times, the way his quiet kindness turned into deadly whirlwind in the battlefield, the way he's unstoppable, undefeatable.

Zulf wanted revenge, and brought death to the Terminals - gentle, silent death with golden skin and dark eyes. Zulf wanted revenge and doesn't know if he wants it still. He wanted justice, but wasn't justice already done, that night, burning alive both innocent and guilty, leaving the grey ash in it's wake?

(Was she afraid, he wonders, when the world around her broke apart? Did she have time to ask for reasons?)

The question is moot, anyway. Kid's coming for the last Shard, and Zulf doesn't believe anybody can stop him. Zulf doesn't believe _he_ can stop him, either; he imagines Kid's eyes on him, flat and bright, Kid's hands, quick, merciless, sure. Zulf shivers.

When his people turn on him, it's almost a relief. 

_Oh, will you come when I call you?_  
_I'll come when you call me._  
_I'll call you at half-past six._  
_Six for the cities all wrecked._

Zulf offers to translate the diary as a gesture of comfort for Zia, nothing more, nothing less. He sympathises with her desire to connect, and with her grief: they take to each other immediately, a contradiction in terms, Ura born and bred, Caelondia-raised, belonging to and rejected by both words.

So, the journal: he offers it as a gift, something to connect her with her late father, and hopes to discover something in it that will offer her some closure. Besides, Kid has to travel further and further for the Cores nowadays, to destinations one more dangerous than other, and Zulf is wary of admitting, even to himself, that watching him fight and bleed makes something small and cold lodge in his throat.

He secludes himself with Zia's father's words instead, reacquainting himself with High Ura, making his way through the intricately written words.

He doesn't expect it to break his newly-made world apart.

Later, fleeing back to Ura from ruined Bastion, trying not to think about how close he came to having Rucks' blood on his hands, he keeps hearing the old priests' words in his head. Worn down and beloved like old prayer beads - peace and atonement, peace and love, peace, peace - they now seem to ring with laughter, scrape his throat raw.

What mockery his life was, what a lie. What bonfire he'll make of it, now. 

_Oh, will you come when I call you?_  
_I'll come when you call me._  
_I'll call you at half-past five._  
_Five's for these warplanes that fly._

When Kid falls down from the Cinderblock Fort's skyway, clothes still smoking a bit, covered in burns hidden by ash and debris, Zulf takes one look at Zia and decides that he's going to take this one.

He helps Kid limp to the monument first, because there's something almost religious in the way Kid approaches the rebuild of Bastion - something that Zulf can't reach or parse, but can respect. He helps Kid put the Core down and watches it's blue light bathe Kid's face as the world around them ripples and restructured.

And after that he takes Kid to the tent and helps him to take (and in some places, cut) his destroyed clothes off. Under other circumstances he'd be mortified - Caelondians and their indecently displayed skin, and touching - but Kid's pale and shaky under his tan, and the smell and sight of soot makes Zulf feel faint and sick. He swallows around it, brings clean water and linens, helps Kid clean his wounds. Zia knocks on the tent's peg and leaves a jar of salve at the entrance.

Zulf returns with it and starts spreading it on the cuts, and at some point Kid's entire wiry, tightly coiled body unwinds, becomes pliant and exhausted under Zulf's hands.

That's when Zulf says, because he can't bear not to, anymore: "You know you don't have to do it anymore, don't you? You did so much already; you don't have to do what he tells you."

Kid's silent for so long Zulf's worried he gave offense. And then finally, quietly: "What else's there to do? Even the Gods are undone. At least this way I can rebuild... something..."

Zulf doesn't have an answer to it, and before he can grope for one, he realizes Kid's asleep in his arms. 

_Oh, will you come when I call you?_  
_I'll come when you call me._  
_I'll call you at half-past four._  
_Four's for the guns of this war._

Kid barely talks, ever. If Zulf didn't hear him speak in their first meeting , he'd think him mute, maybe. If Zulf was a stupider man, he'd think Kid simple.

Zulf isn't a stupid man; Kid, he thinks, is hardly a simple one.

He has little to do with his time here on Bastion, still stunned by his grief, buffeted by loss. He pays his respects to the honored elder's wisdom, but Rucks is taciturn, private: they might enjoy each other's company, maybe, but both are unwilling to try yet. He watches the stars and plans for Kid's journeys, and the Bastion hums about them, startlingly green, safe - but just beyond its borders, the Calamity waits.

So Zulf watches the Kid. Kid's silences are restful; his hands talk instead. Zulf watches him build things, break things; watches him wrestling with the bellows in the Forge, making weapons. Watches him use these weapons out there, his rough quietness transformed into fireworks of precision and force, destruction without anger behind it.

Watches Kid's hands go gentle around the creatures he brings back to the Bastion, around the mementoes he finds. Watches and feels something inside him unlock. 

_Oh, will you come when I call you?_  
_I'll come when you call me._  
_I'll call you at half-past three._  
_Three's for these warships at sea_.

Zulf's stumbling blindly along the once-beautiful paths of Hanging Gardens, now twisted and weird, among the grey-faced statues of the dead. His mind is blank with exhausted terror, his ears are deafened. Death rains from above and howls around, but doesn't touch him. He walks past monsters rising from the ground, slips on petals trampled into dirt, and thinks of the stories of the great war.

He told and retold them so many times, stories smoothed down into safe round pebbles of imagery. Great rams of Ura breaking down the Rippling Walls; great warships of Caelondia seething fire upon the waters. Tragic tales, safe stories of time past, pain forgotten, history remaining. He told them to Ura and Caelondian people alike, preaching peace, and now he thinks: was it like this? Was it how they woke or didn't, death finding them in their beds, tearing their loved ones from their embraces? Did they howl to the skies, did they ask each other, _why, o why, why?_.

Did they have anybody left to ask?

He lives these stories, now. The whole world went insane overnight, and he's the only one left alone with ghosts and howling of the void, and old gods won't protect him.

Finally, he trips and falls down, jerked out of his horrified reverie, and when he looks around, he's at the edge of Hanging Gardens - in place where - in place where -

She took his hand when she said "Yes". She stood where he kneels now. He thinks that maybe, if he looks, he could find marks of her shoes in the ground.

His hands are still smeared grey with his last touch of her.

He freezes, still on his knees, a prayer to Micia stillborn on his lips. He thinks: just one step over the edge, and I won't have to think about it anymore. Just one step…

And then a hand touches his shoulder, and there's a voice, one he's never heard.

"We have to go. Please." 

_Oh, will you come when I call you?_  
_I'll come when you call me._  
_I'll call you at half-past two._  
_Two's for the love of me and you._

Talia's beauty is enough to steal his breath away. Talia's Caelondian's perfect warmth, smell of spices and sea water in the air, screams of the seagulls. When she touches him, Talia is his peace.

They stumble through Hanging Gardens, laughing, and he finds himself babbling, joy bubbling inside of him. The air is shimmery with their laughter, people look at them indulgently, and Zulf doesn't even know what he's talking about, what words spill through his lips, carefree and easy, all meaning lost in her smile, her eyes.

This is what his life came to, the perfection, the pinnacle. Old priest's teaching, his travels, his travails - all coming together, all making sense here, now.

He stops, turns, bows, kneels. Says: "Dearest, beloved, will you be with me?"

She says: "Yes."

When he finds her, later, stumbling and blind with terror, she seems asleep, and he can breathe again.

When he touches her, the ash scatters. 

_Oh, will you come when I call you?_  
_I'll come when you call me._  
_I'll call you at half-past one!_  
_One's for the pretty little baby that's_  
_born, born, born and gone away._

When the old priest catches him, Zulf thinks, here's where it ends. _Can I strike him down? Can I run away? Should I just give up, here, now? _

"Here," the priest says, Ura words sounding rough in his mouth, unfamiliar, unprecise. "You can have it. Do you want to have a word to go with it?"

Zulf wants, oh, Zulf aches. For something that's not just cold, hunger, fear. For something beautiful, impractical, intangible.

"This is the Caelondian word for bread," the priest says. "Come and share it with me."

(And this is how it begins.)


End file.
